Following along with the bird theme, Flock has announced that their code name for the Cardinal successor (Cardinal is the current 0.7.x release) is Cormorant, a medium-to-large seabird. Originally, the next big release was supposed to be Danphe, however they’ve taken a step back to evaluate where they currently are, and where they’d like to be. They feel they have more work to do on Danphe, so they’ve decided upon an “in-between” release which will be Cormorant. Right now, they’ve got a pre-release/preview available for download. Ryan and I spent the last hour checking it out and taking a bunch of screenshots… so.. here is our mini review (don’t forget that you can click the screenshots to view a larger image).

–Download–

The screenshot below shows what the browser looks like right after downloading. Because it is considered a “social browser,” you’ll notice that at the top are links to MySpace and YouTube. Down at the bottom is a bar that can list featured media from either YouTube of Flickr.

–Firefox 2–

Here it is! Finally, Cormorant will be based off of Firefox 2 which means of course it has all of the Firefox 2 goodness! Expect inline spell-check, and if/when the browser crashes, it will prompt you to restore your tabbed session. Among other popular Firefox 2 features, most of them should work smoothly.

–Photo Uploader–

The photo uploader allows you to upload from various services like Flickr and Photobucket, just an extra added convenience.

–Options—

Now under the options, you’ll notice most of them are the same as Firefox 2, like enabling the spell-checker. The structure of options is the same with the exception of the “Searching” which is a Flock only feature.

-Notes–

The notes feature allows you to highlight text, drag the text to your web clipboard, and then the browser saves it. From there, you can go back and view for a later date, blog about it, etc.

–Live Search–

With live search, you can get live search results from places like Amazon, and eBay. However, when we were testing this feature out, it didn’t quite work. This is probably a bug that they need to get worked out for the actual release.

–Feed Reader–

The feed reader worked great. It displays as a “River of news” which means it reads like a newspaper. Articles flow back to back. If you don’t like that, you can read excerpts, or headlines in a single or double column setup.

–Blog Editor–

Also included is a blog editor. It has basic features like inserting hyperlinks, and changing the font color. It’s nothing extravagant, but something they could always build on.

Over the last few months, there has been speculation on what Flock’s next move was; whether it was a release of 0.8, 0.9, or passing right on over to 1.0. For now, there’s no need to speculate with Cormorant coming shortly. In our quick run-through, all of the features were very stable, and the fact that it’s based off of Firefox 2 makes it that much better.